Interview: Alexandra Corinth

As part of my ongoing launch this week, I’m going to be interviewing guest authors here and on the Facebook page. This will be a great way to discover new and exciting authors, and possibly win free copies of their work! Today’s guest is one of my favorite people in all the world, Alexandra Corinth. Alexandra’s first published novel debuted online on the reading/writing site Wattpad, where it quickly garnered hundreds of thousands of reads. She’s also a talented poet and blogger, and I’m proud to have her here this morning!

Q. What do you write, and what inspired you to start?

Interesting question! I am in a weird place with my writing at the moment—while I used to exclusively write YA, I now write just about everything else. I am currently working on a fantasy/fairy-tale-esque novel and a poetry collection of fairy-tale retellings, as well as building a portfolio of short stories and flash fiction to submit to literary journals over the summer.

I started writing when I was seven. I was an early reader, obsessed with books, and when I realized that there were people who made a living writing stories, I knew that’s what I was meant to do. I started by writing long magical stories about a young girl living in Ireland, followed by a slew of plays based on video games that my cousins and I performed every summer in my grandmother’s house. I eventually wrote my first fantasy YA novel when I was thirteen, then another when I was fifteen, another at nineteen and yet another when I was twenty-three. The fourth became The Stories We Tell.

Coffee before I start writing, tea during the writing process. I wish I knew why, but that combination seems to work for me!

Q. Do you have a favorite line that you’ve written? If so, what is it?

I don’t know if I have a favorite line that I’ve written, but one that I am pretty proud of comes from a poem I wrote about a year ago called “carnal.”:

“There is a creature in the mirrorwhere a queen once stood,proud of her sex,a destroyer of destroyers—

I cough, blood on my tongue.”

Q. What are you most known for amongst your friends and family?

Honestly, I am probably most known for my passion for writing! My priority has always been my writing, when I was in grad school and even now, as I’m moving into my possible day-job career, so that’s probably what most people know about me.

Q. Have you ever seen a movie that you thought was better than the book?

Yes! But more importantly, I wish that we would discuss these adaptations in a more complex way. Both of my degrees are in film studies, and the big thing I learned from that experience was how irrelevant fidelity is to my enjoyment of an adaptation. The film version of a book is going to be different—it has to be, because the medium is different! Sometimes a story does better on screen, with actors to deliver the dialogue rather than the voice(s) in my head, with camera angles and editing to develop the characters in a way that text alone cannot. Sometimes a story does better on the page, with all the white space I need to fill in the blanks with my own perspectives. That’s how I like to look at it, anyway, and I have hope that someday we won’t think about book-to-film adaptations in strict fidelity terms.

Q. Is there a message in your writing that you would want your audience to grasp? If so, what is it?

I don’t know if I have a singular message. I mean, I am sure that subconsciously I do, but I don’t like to think about that! : ) That said, the common thread between my YA writing and my current, more “adult” writing is the idea that real life is full of magic, that maybe we just have to look a little closer to find it.

Q. Seven is a something of a ‘power’ number in The Redemption of Erâth; it crops up rather frequently. Is there any similar symbolism or talismanic aspect to your own writing?

Hm! I don’t think so, but again, that’s not something I think about in terms of my own writing, and is probably there without my awareness.

Thank you for your thoughtful answers, Alexandra—and I can’t wait for people to discover your poetry and writing!